Roundup: A plea for better data

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Prime minister Justin Trudeau’s Saturday presser made no big announcements – a review of a couple of their emergency measures for small businesses in particular – and calling on the children of the nation to help out their mothers for Mother’s Day, but that was about it. During the Q&A, Trudeau stated that the government had no plans to pay for masks that were deemed unusable that came from a Montreal distributor, and made the case that the system was working because they identified these masks as being defective before they went out to front line workers. He was also goaded by reporters into saying that he was worried about the situation in Montreal, given that it’s where his riding is, as the province continues to move ahead with their plans to reopen their economy.

The more interesting piece of news came from the ministerial presser that followed Trudeau, wherein Indigenous services minister Marc Miller put out the call for provinces and local public health units to collect data on First Nations, Inuit, and Métis people affected by COVID-19, because that data wasn’t being collected off reserves or Inuit territories. The quality of data collection in this country is an issue because provinces are not consistent or timely about it, which is making us a laggard with comparator countries as we try to get good data on this pandemic. More to the point, not having this kind of data means that we’re not getting good information on how it’s spreading, particularly if you look at some of the communities affected, like La Loche in northern Saskatchewan.

Good reads:

  • Despite pearl-clutching over the government’s apparent silence on Taiwan, Canada is backing a US-led move to get them observer status at the WHO.
  • The question of how our relationship with China will change on the other side of this pandemic is one that many experts are grappling with.
  • Here is a look at how the pandemic has affected egg markets, and why smaller ones than we are used to are winding up in grocery stores.
  • Cancellations of medical procedures to clear the hospitals in anticipation of COVID-19 patients has a lot of people feeling anxious about their surgeries.
  • The National Post profiles New Brunswick’s health minister, given his success in crushing the infection curve in that province.
  • Chantal Hébert bursts the bubbles of those partisans hoping for a fall election to give Trudeau a majority, looking to history as a guide.

Odds and ends:

On Mother’s Day 50 years ago, hundreds of women descended upon Ottawa to protest the government’s new abortion law (which kept it largely illegal).

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